Movies

Big mystery: why "thriller" is so dull

** 1/2 RATING

When Louvre curator Jacques Sauniere scrawled the heavy caveat "so dark the con of man" on the face of Leonardo Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa," he left an anagram clue for cryptologist Sophie Neveu and Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon about the aims and affiliation of his murderer.

With Ron Howard's version of "The Da Vinci Code" hitting thousands of screens today, Sauniere's warning suggests a different sort of conspiracy - hardly holy but wholly familiar.

Beware the strange confluence of marketing and media coverage, pushed along by ax-grinders hoping for a whetstone.

By weekend's end - if quality determines rancor - the gatherings of some Christian soldiers aching for a pop-culture battle will disband.

The film is nowhere near as history-tweaking or controversial as Dan Brown's novel. And it's not as commanding of respect and comment as Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" or even "The Chronicles of Narnia."

There's nothing particularly sacred - feminine or otherwise - at stake with Howard's awkward version, which opened the Cannes Film Festival earlier this week.

It's hard to issue a spoiler alert for a film based on a novel with 50 million copies circulating. Yet for you blessed laggards - I was one until last week - I'll tread carefully.

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If you haven't read the book - if you've avoided the run-up to the movie - you are one of the few filmgoers with a shot at experiencing the movie in a way that might be satisfying. And even then.

Tom Hanks stars as Langdon, an internationally regarded scholar on a book tour in Paris with his latest tome, "Symbols of the Lost Sacred Feminine." Langdon becomes a prime suspect when the dying curator scribbled his name on the floor of the famed Paris museum.

Sauniere's estranged granddaughter. Like Da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton and Botticelli, the curator was a member of the clandestine Priory of Sion, an organization charged with keeping the secrets of the Holy Grail and the truth of Jesus Christ's life, which is...

Virgins, avert your eyes: That Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. That the Holy Grail refers to Magdalene and the fruit of her womb. That in consolidating its power, the Catholic Church savagely suppressed those facts. That the Knights Templar and the Priory made it their business (financially and morally) to safeguard the evidence of the church's massive, and ongoing cover-up.

OK, you can open your eyes.

Sauniere was the fourth and the highest-ranking member of the Priory to be murdered by a determined monk named Silas. Once an outcast because he is albino, Silas (Paul Bettany) found a calling and a patron in a young Spanish priest named Aringarosa. Now a bishop and Opus Dei honcho, Aringarosa (Alfred Molina) has loaned Silas out to a man known only as the Teacher.

The novel maintained a palpable tension between the police captain, Bézu Fache, and the mysterious Teacher. Were they one and the same? It may have been an obvious trick, but Brown sustained it well. Until the end, the reader could be nagged by the question of why the chief investigator is so focused on Langdon and Neveu as suspects.

In the novel, Fache was called the Bull by his underlings. The way Akiva Goldsman has rewritten Jean Reno's character, steer is more like it.

This is one instance among many where the filmmakers jettisoned one of the novel's dramatic tensions but never came up with a competing one.

From the moment they are united by Sauniere's message, Langdon and Nevue are on the lam as well as a quest. This intrigue of pursuit while in flight works on paper but stumbles onscreen.

Langdon and Nevue escape the Louvre and head to a Swiss bank where the "keystone" to the Grail resides. They then escape to Sir Leigh Teabing's security-gated doorstep. The knight, played by Sir Ian

McKellen, is an expert on the competing histories and mysteries of the Grail, the Knights Templar and the Priory.

Thank heaven for McKellen's gift for enuciation. "The Da Vinci Code" often feels like the chattiest movie this side of "My Dinner With Andre," and Teabing is in charge of much of the movie's exposition. But Mc-

Kellen brings energy to his role, which is more than the leads do.

Langdon and Neveu seldom appear endangered. They're too busy making sure we understand their brainy scavenger hunt. When the Teacher brandishes a gun at Sophie's head near Newton's tomb, the situation's gravity seems lost on Langdon.

Hanks' performance is a bigger mystery than anything Sauniere teased us with.

Not until the film's end does the actor deliver anything approaching his talent. His monologue on belief and faith is the only sustained moment of writing - and acting - in the film.

The confounding thing about "The Da Vinci Code" is that while the film runs nearly 2 1/2 hours, it seems hurried.

In a marketplace rife with guides for idiots, dummies and the rest of us, this movie stands as the novel's priciest CliffsNotes.

Lockheed says object part of 'sensor technology' testing that ended ThursdayWhat the heck is that thing? It's fair to assume that question was on the minds of many people who traveled along Colo. 128 south of Boulder this week if they happened to catch a glimpse of what appeared to be a large, silver projectile perched alongside the highway and pointed north toward town.

PARIS (AP) — Bye, New York! Ciao, Milan! Bonjour, Paris! The world's largest traveling circus of fashion editors, models, buyers and journalists has descended on the French capital, clutching their metro maps and city guides, to cap the ready-to-wear fashion season. Full Story